mufandomcom-20200214-history
User blog:Sweetaltina/Legends of the Jedi Game - A newbie's thoughts
Here's some of my thoughts as I went through playing Legends of the Jedi (LOTJ) a multiplayer roleplaying game (MUD). I'm by no means saying any of these things need changed. I'm just an organized crazy person who always puts things into charts of likes/dislikes (pros/cons/t-charts) to guage if I should stay or not. I debated whether or not to post this cause I know how many people are going to HATE hearing things I dislike… cause I'm insulting their baby… yeah I get it. :P Just read it with a grain of salt cause I'm just giving the perspective of a girl who started playing this game 2-3 months ago. I've played Muds over 20 years now, even pay per month ones so I'm trying to just show you what a new person might feel/need in a hope that maybe someone, even one of you, might read this and think… Hmmm.. that's interesting or I never thought of it that way.. Stuff I like about LOTJ - The ability to customize your character yourself. History, Description, Clothing.. I love being able to just make whatever I want and fully customize my character in my own way. I'm super big on the roleplay and it's one of the things I love about this game. The ability to make my girl a self centered piece of shit who cares about nothing but fun, money and sex… Love it! I made a few characters right off the bat cause I love making back stories for them. Man you should see the huge 20 page documents I wrote up on a few of them trying to give em histories. I love the characters I create. They become friends to me. I cry and laugh and groan with dismay at the stuff they do/say. So I love that I can really take the reins and create whatever kinda character I want. - The ability to level things via quests and not having to go hunt. I love the little quests and how they give flavor to your character. There's tons of ways to get the same skill points. I've played many MUDs where the way you level is exactly the same every single time. Step 1 – Find a critter your level. Step 2 – Kill it. Step 3 – Get Experience and put the points in whatever you want.. Step 4 – Die a little inside from boredom (or script the whole experience in which case why are you playing this fucking game if you're scripting every bit of it) That's one of the issues i've found in other games. The amount of people who are pure botting the entire game trying to get to “cap/endgame” so they have that uber character. - That you have to greet people before you know their name and that they can give you a false name. SOO love this. I mean it's annoying as fuck… but it's also awesome to be able to lie and cheat and not have to pretend. In other games I've played everyone’s name is always shown and you just have to “pretend” not to know it until they tell you (or some people don't even do that...), which often ends with a whole lot of suspicion cause how the FUCK did you know my name YOU FUCKING STALKER!!! That you can lie and say you're someone or something else, and they can then dub you as that is kinda awesome. - That you're so lax on language. I came from a game where you couldn't say a ton of words or you'd get “soaped”. I like how the playerbase are treated like adults who can say/do whatever they need to say/do. - That stuff isn't “politically correct”, for example… you can straight up steal from people. You can take their ships. You can kill them. You can take their money. You can knock them out. You can blatantly lie to them. You can even lie about your race/species! PVP is fun sometimes. I come from a game where someone killing you without your permission can get you banned. You can only steal like 1k or so credits from one person before being forced to move on the next person to steal from(LAME!). So I like that this game feels realier. I had to constantly be warned what could “go wrong” by the guy who got me started in this game.. Like I had no idea someone could literally kidnap me. That's so awesome.. not that I'm asking to be kidnapped!!! Just that wow… that's pretty neat that you can get locked up, hand cuffed, knocked out, etc… BTW.. Screw everyone who kept knocking me out and putting me in holding cells… I swear I think I spent more time in cages in this game than out of them. Lol.. - Ships and getting to own them. That's kinda cool to be able to own a “mount” as it were. I wish I could customize it like I can myself and my clothing. Overall I love being able to own my own ship though because it means if I break it it's my own issue and I don't have to worry about breaking something of someone elses. :) Plus I kinda love my lil baby… She's a good ship when people aren't shooting her with ions. - Cargo running, this is one of those things I did end up scripting. I'm fluent in lots of programming languages so script writing for this game was kinda fun. I ended up writing a cargo script that kinda played of the one already provided but let me have some customization. - The ways you can get gear/etc. I like that not everything is available to everyone. You have to find other people to make it for you. How you get the blueprints/etc to be one of the people who can go about making those things for other people is still kinda foggy to me, but it seems cool that the game pushes interactions, even if they are rushed on some peoples parts… I wanna chat for like an hour… I'm totally a people person. - That you can pretty much get a job that's a real job.. :D I love that you can get hired on somewhere and there are different levels to the jobs you can get. I like that you can work your way up. No one wants to stay the lil guy forever and the ability to advance is nicely offered here. - That sex isn't some hidden, don't tell anyone you do it, oh my god what a slut, kinda thing in this game. In other games it's that hidden, secret, OMG you're so naughty thing that's done behind locked doors in inns and the such. Here it's more accepted that people do it and as long as you don't like do public stuff and make people uncomfortable, you're good to go. NOT that I did it much. I just liked having the option to do it, if it worked with my RP of the moment. Stuff I Don't like about LOTJ - The exclusive, we don't want newbies feeling of this game. I'd invited 3 of my non-LOTJ friends to come play this game with me. I thought it would be helpful if we all learned together and could share knowledge between us to grow together. One of the things all 3 of us came away from the game with is how elite the playerbase of this is. The player base has been very reluctant to explain anything and treat you like an idiot on any question they consider “stupid”. It took me hours to figure out by myself how to put away my damn gun (remove/holster…). Sure it's SUPER simple to you guys. But it's not at all intwoative to me coming from a totally different game where you just “put item in container” and “get item from container”, even when you were holding it… Most people helped me by saying some unknown to me acronym or “keyword” and I'd scour the help files in game, wiki outside the game, or if I got stumped… good old google.. until I could figure out what the heck they are talking about… ¾ times I couldn't figure out what the hell it meant, there was no “help KEYWORD/Acronym” file and Google was like “wtf?!”… so I'd have to go ask my friend who got me started on the game.. and he'd be like.. Oh girl.. that's easy… it's blah blah blah. For example, I had no idea there was a “showsocial” or whatever command… Unless I knew to look for that command or search for it… I would have had no idea it was there. Before my friend told me it existed I would go hide in a room and try the socials to see what they looked like. Then I had my friends come stand in a room with me to tell me what they all looked like… And I still dunno how to turn on a damn flashlight for fucks sake… (no help file for flashlight, light, turnon, switch that pertains.. and searching wiki didn't help and google is like, “amazon has a flashlight for $.52!”) That's what I mean.. when you hit a wall you either have to ask for help, which usually you aren't gonna get, or just keep playing with commands until you hit something that MIGHT work. (flashlight on, on flashlight, switch flashlight, turn flashlight, turn on flashlight, turnon flashlight, flip flashlight, push flashlight, smash fucking flashlight on the ground and burn the god damn pieces…. None of those worked) - How hard it is to navigate through the worlds. I get SO lost.. It took me almost a week to figure out how to get outside so I could HAIL bank, and so forth. And all the lifts, and buttons and how to get on ferries and taxi's… all stuff I could NEVER have figured out without my buddy giving me the answers. - Everything I've learned from this game has been through trial and error, making huge mistakes and then after the fact learning my lesson, or begging a friend of mine who got me started on this game (he's been here a while), for the answer. - So much of the information is totally setup to make you make a mistake to learn the lesson… ie, bank accounts. I had no idea it was 5 mil only forever. I was under the impression it was while you were under level 30 like some of the other stuff. So when it let me put 8 mil in my account, I figured… awesome. I'm not a newb anymore! Then the next day it was back down at 5mil… So… Why LET me put more than 5mil credits in an account if you're just going to purge anything over 5mil when I log off? I lost like 3mil silver without realizing it was going to happen. Real banks wouldn't just take the 3 mil from my account and keep it (well maybe the would… but it's still mean.). They'd open a new account and put it in that. - How everyone seems to be doing something else AND playing the game. I'm a fast typer. Most the people I've talked to in the game respond after like 1-2 minutes. It's not a dialog. It's me typing a ton of stuff, asking a list of questions or responding to their question, and then waiting 2 minutes for them to respond or possibly go AFK and then come back later to respond. I'm used to immediate responses and conversations. It feels so stilted in this game sometimes. The best conversations I've had in this game are those that were with the 3 people I brought in, cause we all come from a game where if you take more than a minute to respond, the person who tried to RP with you has moved on to find someone who actually wants to RP. - How little you can customize your interface. One thing I'd love to be able to do is put certain words/names/etc in a different color. When that super hot stormtropper walks in I want bells playing and circus monkeys throwing rice... If there's a way to do that I haven't figured it out yet... Overall I love and hate things about LOTJ. I'll probably keep playing, but only because I've had a couple good interactions with the guy who got me started on the game and because I want to feel the passion he feels for this game. I tried bringing in friends but they won't stay because they dislike feeling like outsiders who aren't in the “cliche” so no one will tell them how to play. So you can thank that awesome guy who got me started and has answered my never ending barrage of “What's TL mean?” “What's an era?” “How can I look at someone without them knowing?” “Why am I dropping credits all over the place while running cargo?” “How do I get a ship?” “How do I fuel my ship?” “I ran outta fuel and am floating over a planet (times 1, 2, 3)… Now what?” “Why is there a stormtropper chasing me?” “Are there REALLY this many cool girls playing this game?” “Someone hailed my ship and told me to tune to a channel… how do I do that?” 'They're gonna shoot me down if I don't asnwer… HELLO!?” “How do I put my fucking weapon away!?!??!!?” “I fell in a river and seem to be drowning.. How do I swim?” “I drown.. now what?” “A god damn hologram just kicked my ass. How do I get revenge?” and the billions of other seemingly stupid questions I asked that marked me a newbie in everyone's eyes… even my own…. I was lucky that I had my friend to help me… But my friends didn't have that one guy who bravely answered all my questions and when they asked on the OOC channel, they either got ignored or given such a vague answer they had no idea how to find the answer to their question… So they just gave up. I at least have that one guy I can force to answer my questions. Lol…. And boy has he ever answered my questions…. Even when he didn't wanna. Even when it was super embarrassing on both our parts.. (Sorry hon!) Even when I didn't understand a god damn thing he was saying… He even taught me how to fly battlegroups and do squadrons and stuff… all of which I've forgotten how to do because my character is too much of a bitch to follow orders well… Opps!! What gets me addicted to games are the people. I haven't made any real connections in this game in the 3 months I've been playing. My character style is very open, talkative, inclusive and inquisitive. Not things that seem to go over well in this game. This seems to be a game where it's frowned upon to ask questions. I'm also really not very formal.. and I'm half TERRIFIED I'll fuck up any emote I do… hehe.. so I do them rarely and practice behind closed doors first.. The only connection I made outside my friends was with one guy this weekend… who seemed kinda interesting.. but who later said he'd kill me for a nickle… but had fun flirting with me. :P (Yeah screw you dude… heh. But thanks for the interactions cause you're probably the ONLY unknown person who tried to include me or talk to me beyond Hi… bye… I have important work to do.). Anyway! That's my take on this game and I hope to keep learning. I'm sure in a few months I'll look back on me now and think “what a newb!!” but for now… I'm living my role. :) www.legendsofthejedi.com Category:Blog posts